= Auditory phonetics
<Auditory phonetics> investigates how listeners hear and interpret the physical sounds of <speech>. The input is an acoustic signal, but the outcome is a perceptual response: identifying a sound, discriminating two recordings or judging their similarity. It connects <acoustic phonetics> to <hearing> and to learned <phonetic categories>.
A simple controlled listening <experiment> presents pairs of recorded sounds in a randomized order and asks whether they differ. A separate identification task asks which category each recording belongs to. The tasks answer different questions: a listener can detect a physical difference without assigning the recordings to different <phonemes>. <Praat> supports forced-choice listening tasks, including same–different and AXB discrimination designs.<Listening Experiments in the Praat Manual by Paul Boersma>[ExperimentMFC, sections 2.5 and 3.1–3.2: randomization strategies, simple discrimination and AXB designs]{ref}
The sound history presented to a listener can also matter. In <Jessica Maye>'s infant study with collaborators, different exposure distributions along a speech-sound continuum produced different later discrimination patterns. The result concerns the tested exposure and task, rather than a complete account of how a <language>'s sound system develops.<Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination by Jessica Maye and others>[2002, abstract and the comparison of unimodal and bimodal exposure distributions]{ref}
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